Looking For a Music Service

My brother-in-law Charles Talbot, asked me where I would look for new music.

Here was my response

I would start with the free Pandora.  We had the premium service for three years before Amanda wanted to move to Rhapsody.

Pros – Cool because you can share the Premium with everyone in your family

Lots of choices

Create your own channels

Cons –

Only about 100 songs in each channel

Can’t choose specific songs to listen too.

Can’t listen offline

There are two paid services worth checking into. Spotify and Rhapsody

I am paying for Rhapsody @$15 a month.  (it would cost me $30 for spotify) (they are both $10 a month for one device)

Rhapsody::

Pro’s

They allow three mobile devices to be playing music at the same time. (This is why I have this service)

download music to your device to listen offline.

Playlists with the most popular music.

Create your own listening Channel

Good variety of prebuilt channels.

Listen through the browser on as many PC’s as you want.(Share with lots of people)

192K for listening(I don’t know this about Spotify

Cons,

Hard to discover new obscure music, but there lots on there

Occasionally, brand new music and old music is not available. In the last three years(Coldplay’s last two albums and Taylor Swifts Red are the only three albums I know of that took a couple of months to finally get on Rhapsody)

Occasionally, on my phone, it forces me to reconnect to the server with a message “Somewhere your account is playing, please login again”

Spotify::I liked this a lot better than Rhapsody a couple of years ago, but I chose Rhapsody because it was cheaper to share with my family

Pro’s

Free Version-Ad supported (This is new, since last checked)

It’s easier to discover new music

Listen to any song when you want to.

Play lists.

Con’s

$10 for each device

Only listen on one device at a time.

Free version forces ads and occasionally throws music in there I don’t like.

I downloaded this today and am going to try out the free version, just for something different.

I might think of switching if they had a family plan.

There are lots of other music services.

Grooveshark has the coolest names but quality of music and selection is more limited.  I payed for this service for a year because I got a t-shirt with the subscription.

Soundcloud – Dennis uses this to find good really obscure music.

googlemusic ( tried this a year or so ago not that great)

Itunes has a radio option, but I’ve only tried it for about 10 minutes, maybe 6 months ago.